In short
Podcast Summary: The Game with Alex Hormozi - Episode 975: How to Charge 3x Without Losing Clients
Podcast Overview
Host: Alex Hormozi Description: This podcast features insights on acquiring customers, increasing profit per customer, retaining clients longer, and sharing lessons from Hormozi's entrepreneurial journey from a net worth of $100M to $1B.
Episode Highlights
Main Theme
- The episode focuses on the concept of pricing strategies in business, specifically how to increase prices without losing clients.
Key Discussions
AI and Business Dynamics
- Alex opens the episode with a humorous yet thought-provoking discussion on AI and its implications for human competition in business, emphasizing that it's a human versus machine dynamic.
The Importance of Value
- The conversation shifts to the topic of giving versus taking in business relationships, highlighting that genuine value should be provided without expecting immediate returns.
Caller Interactions
Caller 1
Dr. Sonia Deserich (Chiropractor)
- Background: Dr. Deserich has been in practice for two years and is trying to navigate business growth without overstretching.
- Mistakes and Learning: Noted previous mistakes in overspending on mentorship and marketing.
Key Advice from Alex
- Investment in Learning: Treat expenses for learning as investments rather than losses.
- Business Model Choices:
- Path of an Artist vs. Businessman: Decide whether to focus on being a skilled technician (artist) or transitioning to a business-minded approach.
- Two Success Paths:
- Increase prices due to high demand.
- Scale operations and hire others to manage production.
- Customer Retention Strategies: Dr. Deserich should choose between creating a high-ticket service or developing a model that retains customers, emphasizing the importance of creating "sticky" service offerings.
Caller 2
Fishing Guide Business
- Background: The caller runs a niche business helping fishing guides grow their businesses through cold outreach.
- Concerns: Questions related to metrics and scaling to $10K/month revenue.
Key Insights from Alex
- Target Audience: Shift focus to higher-performing fishing guides rather than underperformers to add more value and charge effectively.
- Decommoditization: Emphasize creating unique offerings that differentiate the service from competitors (e.g., bundling experiences, enhancing customer service).
- Revenue Model: Encourage the caller to charge more based on the value provided, rather than competing on price.
Core Takeaways
- Value Creation: Building a business around genuine value, whether through high-ticket services or strong customer retention strategies, is critical.
- Business Mindset: Entrepreneurs must recognize when to pivot between being an artist or a businessman, understanding the necessary skills and strategies required for successful growth.
- Experimentation and Adaptation: Success often requires a willingness to experiment with offerings and adapt based on market feedback.
Conclusion In this episode, Alex Hormozi provides actionable insights on how to strategically increase service prices while maintaining client loyalty. By focusing on value creation and understanding the dynamics of their business models, entrepreneurs can navigate pricing challenges effectively.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00We're going to do more Mosey, her Mosey hotline, and we're going to come in hot. what if AI kills us all? You won't know because you'll be dead. And if it kills everyone, then all status games are over. And as soon as it's human against machine, we all lose. And until then, it's going to be humans using machines against humans using machines, which is what it's been since the dawn of time, except swap machines for tech. You get the idea. I would love to know how to be a giver and not a taker. Super easy, bro. You just give and don't ask for anything back and you give to people. and then when they ask you if they could do something then at that point you're taking hey Alex how you doing what's up man all right talk to me what's up this is uh this is Dr.
0:46Sonia Deserich man I'm a chiropractor been two years in so far seven years as a total chiropractor and yeah man I'm just trying to figure out like okay when I build momentum this year and it's like okay how do I know when to keep going for more how do i know when to just keep the momentum that i'm at not overstretch because i made a mistake earlier this year and i'm just writing the loans ever since all right when do you what was the mistake yeah i started diving into mentors sales coaching marketing on facebook i'm just getting in all these expenses just trying to grow from the revenue i got okay well first off i'll say this if you pay one-time expenses in order for you to learn, I wouldn't see those as losses unless you learn nothing.
1:30If you learn things that are just you need to put into place in the business and they haven't fully come to fruition yet, I just see that as an investment. So I just wouldn't frame it that way. Like thing one. Okay. Second thing, are you at full capacity at your existing location? No, I was at that. I mean, I'm not. No. Okay. Got it. So do you know how to advertise to get leads? i've had some help from other marketing companies okay i think it's worth you learning for yourself if you want to like if you want to be in this in the because like the transition that you have to make right now and this is a bit of a decision for you which is like do i want to be an artist or do i want to be a businessman and there's nothing wrong with either of those but you have to make a choice okay it's let me give you let me give you a totally different example but it'll illustrate the point so let's say that you're really good at making leather wallets.
2:19Let's say you're a craftsman. You make these leather wallets. People start wanting them. You keep making more leather wallets. There's two success paths. Success path one is you just love making wallets, but you have more demand than you have time. You keep doing a good job, and people keep wanting them. You can only make 10 wallets a day or whatever your math is. Then all you do is you keep raising the price because you have more demand than you can handle. Keep raising the price. And that is to me, the path of the technician is the path of the artist. The other path, and there's nothing wrong with that.
2:49And you can make a ton of money doing that. The other path is the path of businessman. He says, okay, you know, I have these leather wallets. I can hire other people to make these wallets for me. I'm going to train them up or I can build machines that can do this with automation. I'm going to build a manufacturing line that can make these wallets even better than I could at, you know, a faster rate. And I can do it because I'm buying in bulk. I can buy, you know, materials for half the price. And then all of a sudden he becomes a businessman. Right. But all of a sudden you're like, wait, I was a wallet guy.
3:21Why do I have to learn manufacturing and supply and all this other stuff? It's like, well, it's because it's a different game. And so I think for you as a chiropractor, you have to make the call. Do I want to be a businessman or do I want to be a chiropractor? Do I want to be a technician or do I want to be in the game? I think I've been I went from being the artist to let me switch to businessman and then I'm like learning the hard way and I'm like I think I want to go back to being the artist the hard way is the only way dude it's the only way how long did it take you to learn to be a car parker seven and a half years and business isn't any different if anything there's more stuff true I'm only two years in so I'm waiting for that third year to five yeah I promise you this And I hope we have a great callback.
4:04So I'll see if we could have a note on this. I promise you that when you're five years in, if you keep at it, that's the big caveat. If you keep at it, you'll grow. If that's what you want. If you keep at it. All the money I had from all my gyms went to zero after five years. So like the only thing that's the outcome of this is your skills. That's all. And you're used to investing in education. So I don't think there's anything wrong with that. but with regards to like all we have to do for your business though like like let me zoom all the way out for like how do you make this thing successful the the end state of what this looks like for you is that you nail your individual model with a way to have very sticky customers option one or option two you find a way to charge as much as generally possible i've really rarely seen chiropractors who succeed in any other way they either have a very very good recurring model that people don't stop, or they charge$5 ,000,$10 ,000 for more specialized neuropathy, blah, blah, blah, that kind of stuff.
5:05And they sub-specialize in the things that people are willing to pay a ton of money for. And they sell year-long service packages with supplements and things like that. So it's either ultra-high ticket, or you build something that has really high stick. Once you nail that model, then, like I'm telling you the skills that you're going to have to learn. That's thing one. Thing two is in learning that you'll have to learn how to generate leads and sell them, right? After you've done that part, then you're going to have to learn the game of attracting talent and you'll probably have to give up, call it 10 %-ish, maybe 20, of the single location to get another chiropractor in there who's motivated enough to continue to work as hard as you will to make sure that the service quality is high.
5:44And then at that point, you'll ascend into the M &A game, which is either, and I would recommend given the nature of the business that you're in. I would probably go via the M &A route rather than build. So I'd rather just buy, just find, it's so easy to find chiropractors that are, you know, that will sell their businesses for basically zero, that it's easier to just retrofit them. And then that would be once you're in the game game, but that might take five to seven years and that's okay. I'm being wrong. There's a joke. There's a joke you made. Once you're done with medical school, you get paid the big bucks, like what, 10 years later.
6:15So I'm like, what, two years away from that? Three years? Yeah, we make the big bucks a decade later. I'll stay in the game. I'll do my best. All right. Appreciate you, man. Thanks for calling in. Tell me the one thing that you want me to help you with your business right now. All right. Talk to me, man. All right. So I have a school community where I help fishing guys grow their business. I have a question about cold outreach metrics. Sweet. You help phishing guides grow their business. Yes. Dude, that is a niche. All right, let's rock this. All right, so, okay, and you help them with outreach or are you doing outreach?
6:58I'm doing outreach, and I have questions about my metrics. Okay, go for it. So what are you doing outreach on? So I use Google to manually find 700 phishing guides' phone numbers. and my money model is essentially to give away all the information for free as a decoy offer and then upsell them into a one-on-one coaching tier. So I sent them a message asking if they want a free step-by-step guide to learn how to get more booking. About 8 % of them said, sure, send it over. Then I send them a link to my about page, which converts at about 15 % for that free decoy offer and then i was able to get a couple people to pay for one-on-one coaching which got me to about a thousand dollars a month but my goal is to get to 10 a month so my question for you is should be i'd be more focused on improving the metric since fishing guides is such a small niche or i just need it's a small pun pun intended i need a couple quick stats that i I want to get from you.
8:02So how much does the average fishing guide make? The average fishing guide makes probably about 30 to 50 grand a year in process. Oh, okay. Got it. So 30K to 50K. Okay. How many actual fishing guides are there in, I guess, I mean, shoot, is it mostly the U.S. that you work with? Yeah. From what I can find, there's about 10 ,000. 10 ,000. Okay. Okay, how much money can you help them make? I've already helped other people do it. I can usually get them to about$5K per month in revenue, about$3K a month profit after about the first three months. But aren't they already doing that? If they're making$30K to$50K profit starting?
8:52Well, I mean, they are already a fishing guide, and then I'm coming in and helping them scale their business. So it's not from, like, literally zero revenue. So, let me ask this differently. They're currently making$30 ,000 a year take home. You can help them add another$30 ,000 to$50 ,000. Does that sound correct or is that too much? Ayo for you, Ayo. Hello? Hello? I think he cut bait. I think the line snapped. All right. Is it working? There we go. Reeled him back in.
9:28okay so they're making thirty thousand dollars how much money do you help them make more than they're currently making three thousand dollars a month so more than they're currently making i can usually add about an extra two thousand dollars on top of what they're i i guess the part i forgot to mention is i target underperforming fishing guys man i mean you just got to get 10 people to pay you like 500 bucks a thousand bucks a month right that's what you want yeah high ticket yeah i'll say this don't tell yourself that's high ticket all right because it's not it's not high ticket it's media mish but the point is this so there's 10 000 if your goal is to get to 100 000 a year or 10 grand a month you can absolutely do it within this vehicle if you so you found 700 of them you think there's 10 000 of these fishing guides yeah i've already reached out to 700 i still have a fresh list with like 900 people who i haven't reached out to yet how many times you're reaching out to that list of 700 i hit them up probably like including follow-ups probably three or four different times it's pretty much i've milked them for about all they're worth now well you mean you've done three or four reach outs in total to the list each one of those reach outs was like a multi-step attempt yes Okay.
10:51So I'll tell you what I don't like. I'll tell you what I do like. I do think that the goal of getting to$10 ,000 a month in this niche is super doable. I don't think you should reach out to the people who are underperforming. I think you should probably reach out to people who are performing well and maybe learn from them so that you can provide more value. So it's like you have a small amount of people who don't make a lot of money and you add a little bit of money to their business, right? So if we can, like I would want one of these three things to change. It's like, I would like to have a lot of people that I get a little bit of value.
11:21I would like to have a small amount of people that I get a lot of value to. Right now, you're kind of like, and also all those people don't have money to start with. So it's like, we have three things kind of working against us. We have to fix one of these. So you can't fix there being more efficient guides. You can't do that. So you're really just stuck with, I can target people who have more money, or I can make them more money. Which of them is more feasible for you? my big piece of proof that i have which is i guess it might be a limiting belief on why i don't want to swing out of my weight class but i am a fishing guide i've been running my own fishing charter business for like the last five years and i'm at about five thousand a month in profit so it feels it feels a little weird to go too far above what i've actually done i don't want to tell you to stop doing the business you're doing i do think that like is there like what stops you from doing going from five to like 20?
12:11In my fishing charter business you mean? Yeah. It's going to sound like a like a bad answer I know but I have all the work that I want to be able to handle with that business like I'm I'm going to get burned out if I push myself harder. So I've got I've got a wild idea what if I mean you know how to generate demand right because I'm guessing that's how you got this business what if you charged more? It would have to be pretty significantly more. Yeah, like a double. My first fear would be that it would be productized. Like people would compare prices because there's a lot of other fishing guides around in my area too.
12:49Yeah. So what's the first chapter in offers? Do you know? I've read it about three times. I should know, but I don't know. I'll tell you, the first chapter is you're selling a commodity. And so when you sell a commodity, you compute on price. when you celebrate some offer you can be on value and so to become separate from everybody else in your space which i think is worth you learning because if you're going to if you're going to help these guys with their businesses they're all commoditized as well so you have to help them out of this commoditized struggle otherwise they're like fundamentally you're just going to help them get to a business that you're currently burned out on that doesn't feel good right so i kind of want you to fix your business which i think if you do you will make more money in the short term and long term.
13:37Okay. Which is not the answer that you expected. Like the simple answer for your current thing, like in terms of degrees of advice, the easiest thing to do would be like, go find more leads, reach out to more of them, and make sure that you're keeping the people you got. You can charge a thousand bucks a month. Okay, fine. That's like the short term advice. But the kind of like medium to long term advice is we have to figure out a way for you to either target ones that make more money or help the ones that come in to make more money. The only way to do that long term is to actually like make more money with your own thing or help the people that you already have far surpass your existing numbers.
14:13Can they pass your numbers? Could you help them if they wanted to? Could they pass my revenue numbers, you mean? Yeah, or take them, yeah. Oh yeah, for sure. Okay, well then why don't you go help people do that and then you'll be able to charge more. I see, okay. So help fishing guides surpass my number. I hope they all beat you. Yeah. And if you don't want to go back into the fishing business, fine. You can experiment with the customers you have with a new or better offer. But you have to be able to sell around a commoditized pricing structure. Otherwise, so let me say this differently because I think, like, I want this to really hit for you.
14:49And obviously I'm talking to a zillion other people who are listening in. If you sell a commodity, you will be priced at the point of burnout. The marketplace is ruthlessly efficient at getting people to just make enough to survive and not make enough to thrive. Because that's the place where people will stay and provide a commoditized good. So you have to break out of that, otherwise the market will force you. Capitalism is very efficient. The market will force you to give as much as you can for as little as possible until eventually you can't give any more for any less. You remember that chapter in the book.
15:25And there's nothing left. you are in that boat right now. Man, in that boat. I'm not even trying on that one. So we have to decommoditize the offering that either you or the fishing guides you're teaching are making so that they can charge twice as much, three times as much. What else can a fishing guide provide that other people don't provide to make the whole experience better? Can we bundle multiple things in? Can we sell multiple sessions? Can we bring food on there? Can we grill the fish with them and bring a chef so they get the full, like I grilled it on the side of the boat, threw some lemon on, I've never had fish better in my life because we're right out of the water.
16:00Can we create an experience around this that's more than just like, I'll take you out and you'll catch a fish or you won't? Oh yeah, there's definitely ways to add a lot of extras on. Awesome. And people who buy fishing, typically, many of them have a lot of money. So give them the opportunity to spend it with you. Yeah, that totally makes sense. And it's kind of a double whammy because it helps with the main fishing charter business and with the school community to be able to show other people how I did it. So, yeah, it's perfect. Let's do that. Do you feel better? Yeah. So this solves the core issue.
16:39Go fix your business. Make a Grand Slam offer. Charge significantly more so that you can make more. So that you have the confidence to then show the guys that you help make way more. if they make way more, guess what you get to do? Charge more. And you'll be able to start attracting the people who aren't just bottom scrapers. They're the ones who are actually doing okay, but want to do great. Those are the ones who pay big dollars. People who are on their last line, they don't have much last line. Jesus, I like, I'm unstoppable today. Does that make sense? Yeah, I get it. All right, rock and roll.
17:14Appreciate you, man. Yes, man. All right, have a good one.
From the publisher
Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast, you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned and will learn on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.
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